1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data transfer systems integrated into a semiconductor product communicating via a data transfer device, and in particular through an arbitration process in an architecture comprising various functional units.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of microelectronics, more and more functions are now integrated within a single semiconductor product, be it telecommunication functions (Ethernet, wireless communications) or sophisticated data processing, generally using sophisticated processors for signal processing.
The development of complete systems, embedded on a single chip, is spreading. Such on-chip systems include multiple functions within a single semiconductor product and in particular advanced multi-media functions, and there are even telephones offering sophisticated audio processing, such as MP3 (mpeg1 layer 3) reading.
The accumulation of various functional blocks within a single circuit poses the problem of inter-communicability between these functional blocks, which is in general ensured by an interconnect, managed by an arbitration mechanism, such as shown in FIG. 1, where there is an interconnect 10 communicating with three functional blocks 20, 30 and 40, respectively.
The evolution of technologies and the constant renewal of consumer products force to permanently redesign system general architectures and, generally for known systems, each time it is necessary to re-examine the whole architecture, and in particular the arbitration mechanism of the interconnect that is an essential element thereof.
As a result, development teams waste a great amount of time, which is detrimental to the renewal of product ranges and quick launching of new products.
It would be desirable to standardize certain aspects of the architecture of on-chip systems, in particular in order to make re-use of the interconnect arbitration function easier within a complete on-board system, allowing easy modifications of said architecture.